Databricks releases free data for training AI models for commercial use

Databricks, a San Francisco-based startup last valued at $38 billion, released a trove of data on Wednesday that it says businesses and researchers can use to train chatbots similar to ChatGPT.

The data, based on questionnaires of employees of Databricks, fills in an important gap in the company’s efforts to create commercially usable tools to train AI systems that could offer alternatives to Microsoft-backed OpenAI.

Databricks said it spent the past several weeks gathering 15,000 questions and responses from its 5,000 employees in 40 countries and then vetted the data for quality, an effort Chief Executive Ali Ghodsi estimated cost the company millions of dollars.